By John Beck

The trenches have been dug in Cizre. Several feet wide and
paired with mounds of earth and torn-up building material, they appeared
blocking roads in this Kurdish enclave in southeastern Turkey after
Ankara launched an intensive air campaign against the banned Kurdistan
Workers’ Party (PKK) in July.

Children play on them during
daylight hours. But at night, when police move in, they’re patrolled by
groups of armed youths, who attempt to repel these official incursions
in fierce clashes that have left at least one dead and many injured.
Cizre
has spent years on the fringes of war. The unremarkable-looking town of
just over 100,000 lies on the Tigris River, around 30 miles from the
tripoint where Turkey meets conflict-ravaged Syria and Iraq, and
violence regularly strays over the national boundaries. Now, the cycle
of airstrikes and renewed PKK attacks on Turkish troops threaten a
return to the three-decade-long struggle between the two sides that
claimed more than 40,000 lives. And here, residents feel like they’re at
the heart of the fight.
“There’s a saying, ‘if there’s peace, it
will start from Cizre, and if there’s war, it will start from here as
well,'” the town’s co-mayor Leyla Imret, 28, told VICE News recently.
“And we can say we have a civil war in Turkey.” Imret, whose father was
killed by security forces when she was five and grew up in Germany,
describes her ward as a center of resistance against President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP).

It’s
obvious even without the trenches. The town’s gray walls are graffitied
with the myriad acronyms of Kurdish militant groups: the PKK, its
umbrella organization the KCK, youth arm the YDG-H, Syrian affiliate the
YPG, and “Apo,” a reference to PKK founder and leader Abdullah Ocalan.
The police presence in the town itself is minimal, despite authorities
calling in reinforcements from the surrounding area, and the patrols
that do take place are conducted in convoys of armored vehicles.

The
airstrikes began on July 24 after the PKK killed two police officers in
retaliation for a suicide bombing in the border town of Suruc that left
33 pro-Kurdish activists dead. The attacker was trained by the
so-called Islamic State (IS), but Kurds blamed the security forces for
laxity or collusion, and claimed the murdered officers had been working
with the jihadists.
The strikes are part of a two-pronged “war on
terror,” claimed to focus on both the PKK and IS, but so far
concentrated almost entirely on the militant Kurds. The group, which
Turkey, as well as the US, view as a terrorist organization due to its
history of attacks on civilian and military targets, has since launched a
number of assaults on army and police targets, killing several.
Cizre’s
history of unrest and PKK support goes back decades. During the worst
of the insurgency in the 1990s, dozens were killed in frequent street
fighting.

‘When it gets intense the armed guys intervene. Everyone has a responsibility.’

A
landmark 2013 ceasefire agreement brought a fragile peace to Turkey’s
mostly Kurdish southeast and granted more rights to a population long
subject to restrictions on use of its own language and cultural
practices. But Cizre was one of the spots where cracks in the peace
process showed first.
When IS looked set to capture the
Syrian-Kurdish border enclave of Kobane from the YPG in October, as
Ankara looked on, seemingly disinclined to help, Turkey’s Kurds erupted.
Clashes between YPG supporters, backers of the Kurdish Islamist Free
Cause Party (Hüda-Par), and security forces killed at least 35.
The
YDG-H subsequently declared it had established autonomy in Cizre,
constructed trenches, and set up checkpoints searching cars and people
from night until dawn. Tensions rose again come winter, when a number of
youths died in fighting, including two children — Umit Kurt, 14, and
Nihat Kazanhan, 12 — who apparently perished at the hands of police in
January.
Ocalan subsequently appealed for calm in Cizre in a
missive widely seen as aimed at the YDG-H youth wing. It backed down and
dismantled the fortifications. The group finds easy recruiting in the
impoverished town due to slim employment opportunities and heavy-handed
policing that sweeps up many youths for alleged links with the KCK,
often putting them on a path to militancy in the process.

An
18-year-old who asked to go by the pseudonym “Shorishger
[revolutionary] Botan” took VICE News on a nighttime patrol of the Cizre
neighborhood his group was responsible for.
The group of masked
teenagers in multicolored sneakers with pistols thrust into their
trousers made their way down poorly lit, bullet-hole specked alleyways,
taking turns to dash across roads where police might have their guns
trained and crossing rooftops with a system of makeshift ladders to
reach lookout spots.
Some were tense, large numbers of security
forces had attempted to move into the district from multiple routes on
several nights previously, leading to fierce fighting that left several
of their number injured. There was no repeat of the mass offensive that
night, but sporadic gunfire continued into the early hours of the
morning and police repeatedly fired tear gas into the neighborhood.

Botan
said his group took turns watching entrance routes both day and night.
He pointed out with pride the defensive fortifications, which he said
had been excavated with a bulldozer of their own, then re-dug when
police tried to fill them in, and re-dug again. They were large enough
to block even armored personnel carriers from entering, but the foot or
so of clearance each side allowed local local residents to negotiate
them on foot or motorbike.
He outlined his group’s “teams,”
organized by different roles, including the supply and use of different
weapons, such as rocks and Molotov cocktails. “We have stones,
firebombs, fireworks, and guns here as well,” he said. “When it gets
intense the armed guys intervene. Everyone has a responsibility.”

The
feeling of mass resistance goes well beyond the youth. Most
residents saw it as necessary to stop a perceived anti-Kurdish crackdown
characterized by the mass arrests of young people and extreme police
brutality.
The crackdown, they say, is revenge. In
Turkey’s general election of June 7, the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic
Party (HDP) exceeded the 10 percent vote threshold required to secure a
parliamentary presence for the first time. In doing so, it blocked
Erdogan’s ambitions of securing a “super majority” for the AKP, which
would in turn allow him to alter the constitution and vastly expand his
own powers.
Since the airstrikes, the president has also called
for members of the HDP to be stripped of parliamentary immunity,
accusing them of links with the PKK. Hundreds of
people, including members of the HDP and Democratic Regions Party (DBP),
have now been arrested on similar charges.

‘When it’s a policy and we know it’s systematic attack on our people, we take precautions’

“Everyone
is digging trenches. Before the youth were the targets, now everybody
in their houses is targets for the police,” Mesut Nar, the local DBP
co-chair told VICE News in the party’s Cizre offices. As we
spoke, reports of a Turkish airstrike on the village of Zergele in the
Qandil Mountains that killed eight civilians appeared on a wall mounted
TV. Mustachioed older men shook their heads and tutted at looped footage
of bodies wrapped in blankets being carried out over the rubble of
houses.
A 38-year old who asked to be known as “Rebar Cudi”,
because he’d just been released from a jail sentence due to his
political activities, showed VICE News around the town during the day.
He said the trenches and barricades were necessary to stop waves of
arrests, adding that they were constructed by groups of locals as soon
as the airstrikes and detainments began. “When there are small incidents
this doesn’t happen, but when it’s a policy and we know it’s systematic
attack on our people, we take precautions.”
Police are adapting
to the defences, he added, and have drafted in armed bulldozers. One had
been used the previous night to smash through two walls of a factory
compound in order to reach a blockaded road.
“Like the air
strikes, the raids in the street are every night to apply psychological
pressure,” he said. “This is the price of the 13 percent [the HDP’s vote
share]… They [the AKP] are taking revenge on the HDP.”

The
latest victim of the violence was Hasan Nerse, 17, who was
reportedly shot dead by police on July 29. Pictures said to be of his
bloodied body circulated in the hours afterwards. He had been wearing
traditional clothes and was seemingly summarily executed: his hands
cuffed behind his back, one bullet wound to his leg, and several to his
chest.
The exact circumstances of Nerse’s death are unclear. His
relatives say he and some friends had driven into town for ice cream at
around midnight. At some point, the car swerved to avoid a police
roadblock, prompting a short car chase before the boys crashed and tried
to escape on foot while police shot at them. Nerse appears to have been
hit in the thigh and arrested while his companions escaped. The results
of his autopsy have not yet been released to his family or lawyers.
At
the dual lane road where he died, bullet holes shot from at least two
different positions scar storefronts and an adjacent wall. The streets
were quiet when it happened and the shops shuttered. Residents all
report hearing gunfire, but most took cover, rather than investigating
further.

In
a building opposite, a teenager told VICE News he’d heard shouts that
someone was injured and tried to go outside, but swiftly retreated when
officers pointed their guns at him. The police then drew up vehicles so
as to obscure the scene, he says. Afterwards, he describes hearing
repeated orders for someone to put their hands up.
Another man
showed VICE News a phone video which he said he’d taken from a balcony.
In it, a young man, said to be Nerse, can be seen handcuffed face down
on the street between police vehicles, still conscious and moving. This
man also describes the vehicles then being moved to block off the scene.

Another witness, who had also been nearby in an upstairs
apartment, gave VICE News a similar account. “People were saying someone
was injured, but anyone who put their head out of the window they
[police] fired tear gas at… They [police] were shouting ‘What is in
your hand?’ asking him questions like ‘Who are the people you were
with?’… but he wouldn’t give his friends names.”

Nerse
came from a typically large family, and is survived by both of
his parents and four brothers and two sisters. A close relative, who
asked not to be named, spoke with VICE News on the third day of the
funeral proceedings in Cizre’s central mosque. Sat amid a group of
middle-aged men alternating sips of water and sugary tea, and fanning
themselves with strips of cardboard, he described Hassan as a keen
secondary school student who was well liked and “obsessed” with both
football and travel, but not politically active.
Later that day a
funeral procession set off from the BDP headquarters attended by
relatives, local officials, and dozens of local residents. The crowd,
led by family members holding a banner with Nerse’s face alongside
Ocalan’s, chanted anti-government slogans and made their way to the
mosque, clambering over barricades and around ditches.

‘The police don’t differentiate between women, children, and teenagers, they just kill everyone’

Speaking
outside the mosque, surrounded by other female relatives,
Nerse’s mother, Emine, 50, defiantly grasped a picture of her
son wrapped in Kurdish colors. “He was just a kid he didn’t have
anything to do with politics,” she told VICE News. “He was just wearing
traditional clothes. It’s our costume, we’ve been wearing it for
hundreds of years. He just had dinner and went out with his friends to
the market.”
Emine also saw his death as a result of the AKP’s
perceived anti-Kurdish policies. “They [police] don’t differentiate
between women, children, and teenagers, they just kill everyone. What we
demand is only our rights, the use of our language and our identity…
It’s what our child wanted as well and what all human beings want. We
don’t want war, we want peace and for mothers to have peaceful lives and
see their children growing up.”

But more sons and daughters will inevitably lose their lives
to this current period of unrest. The HDP and other political groups
are appealing for peace, as did co-Mayor Imret, lamenting that the dead
were inevitable victims of the political process.
Erdogan said
late last month that peace was “impossible” and Zagros Hiwa, a spokesman
for the KCK, told VICE News that “a new era of struggle and resistance
has started for the Kurds.” And violence has continued in Cizre on an
almost nightly basis. On Friday, PKK linked assailants fired rifles and
rocket propelled grenades at a police team that arrived at one of their
trenches, injuring one officer.
A few days previously Botan
vowed that he and others like him would fight to the death. The YDG-H is
made up of radical youth who grew up in conflict with the state. But it
has little in the way of formal leadership and it may not be easy to
reign them in. “There will be a civil war in Turkey,” another masked
youth interjected. “We will go town by town.”

https://news.vice.com/article/there-will-be-a-civil-war-in-turkey-welcome-to-cizre-the-center-of-kurdish-resistance
Follow John Beck on Twitter: @JM_Beck